Topologie des métalangages dans les textes de sociologie

• Main Author: Jean-Yves Trépos
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Université de liège 2013-12-01
• Series: Signata
• Subjects: meta-language; ontology; social theory
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/signata/957

Sociological writings seem to spread metalanguages on the whole text, without any link of continuity and to offer very few space to explicitly metalinguistic sequences. To escape the risk of being unable to do anything with such a report, the epistemologist of writing — so to say — may run the hypothesis that metalinguistic devices have the ability to stabilize textual ontologies in various ways, all of them having close degrees of legitimity. Particularly, these metalinguistic devices (here called: « agencements ») are equally able to build intra or metatheorical sequences of sociological arguments. One of the opportunities to observe how these agencements perform, is to pay attention to their places, such favoring a topological approach of metalanguages. Considering sociological papers, in French and English speaking journals, we focus on two specific tools which seem quite close: the footnotes and the brackets. The results show that these various regimes of metalinguistic enonciation are strongly cohesive and need not to have explicitation and continuity as felicity conditions.